Good Time Girls

Good Time Girls

Liam Hennessy

The Profumo Affair helped defeat a government and usher England into the Swinging Sixties. But the villains of the piece were not the politicians or the young women whose names became famous but the sleazy and prurient popular press.

More
One Book, Two Cities

One Book, Two Cities

Tom Wall

James Plunkett’s classic novel reminds us of a society in which the poorest lived in the most appalling and hopeless conditions and the middle and upper classes were barely conscious of their existence.

More

Patrick Pearse Predicts the Future

Bryan Fanning

Writing in 1906, the man who would later be one of the leaders of the Easter Rising envisaged a future one hundred years hence in which Ireland would have made enormous strides and English would be taught in schools only in Belfast and Rathmines.

More

The Hunger Angel

Siobhán Parkinson

Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller looked with the eyes of the victim on the political masters of terror and called it by its name.

More

A Tearless People

Pádraig Murphy

The year is 1937 and the place Moscow, one of the key settings in European history and a fault line in the history of civilisation.

More

1916 As Spectacle

Angus Mitchell

In an age when martyrdom is demonised and tagged with notions of fanaticism and people are reluctant to protest for a cause let alone die for one, 1916 presents an easy target.

More

Trompe l’Oeil

Keith Payne

All is very far from what it seems in a literary mystery novel by poet Ciaran Carson set in Belfast and Paris.

More

Street Smart

Fintan Vallely

Lyrics have been defined as short poems written to the accompaniment of a musical instrument, but should Paul Muldoon’s lyrics be judged primarily as poems or as songs?

More

Cronin's Titanic Ready For Launch

Nothing can go wrong. Anthony Cronin's epic poem, with music by Donal Lunny, is set to sail.

More

Lydia Davis wins International Man Booker

The American minimalist short story writer follows Ismail Kadare, Chinua Achebe, Alice Munro and Philip Roth.

More

John Gray's Progress

Back in 2002, John Gray's attempt to expose the supposed emptiness of our ideas of reason and progress brought Terry Eagleton out in a rash.

More

Secrets of the Irish Landscape

This book examines many little understood aspects of the Irish landscape from the last Ice Age until now. Historians, archaeologists, biologists and earth scientists each bring their own perspective on  the landscape and the life it has supported, giving a new understanding of the history of the Irish ecosystem.

Read extract

Edmund Burke

A new biography of  the Irishman now claimed by the Conservatives as their founding father. The author sees Edmund Burke as one of the eighteenth century's golden generation, which includes his friends Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon. Burke, it is argued, was a dazzling orator and visionary theorist who is now underrated.

Read extract

Towards Commemoration

Contemporary Ireland, north and south, was founded in the decade 1912-23. From the signing of the Ulster Unionists' Solemn League and Covenant to the partitioning of the country and subsequent civil war in the Irish Free State, a series of events shaped Ireland  for the century to come.

Read extract